Get ready for a week-long Brandon Iron festival. This is one of my favorite interviews, and I intend to present it more or less in its entirety, across the space of several days.

Brandon, a performer and upcoming director in the adult film industry, met me in late September of 2002 to tape this interview. For some reason we ended up staging the shoot oustside of a Ralph’s Supermarket in Sherman Oaks, as the odd peripheral noise will attest. I wanted to meet in a coffee shop, but the Starbucks we tried was even worse in terms of background blabber. We weren’t sure where the hell else to go . . .

Our discussion centers around Brandon’s “Slap Happy” video series, a controversial rough oral-sex series which he produced to great beratement in 2000 and 2001 for Rob Black’s Extreme Associates. At the time of our interview, the four tapes had garnered both high praise within the adult industry and serious damnation from without.

Brandon and I have stayed in touch since our initial meeting, and I’ve continued to find him one of the more fascinating people in my life.  He’s always amongst the smartest guys in the room. Brandon’s quick and funny, as well as remarkably perceptive. But what sets him apart from most (and what makes him an ideal interview subject) is that he’s mindblowingly open. I dealt him a host of difficult questions during our interview, and his responses were just so honest and uncalculated that it took me aback.

I can’t say that I agree with all, or even most, of what Brandon says, though I also admit, with some trepidation, that I’m a fan. I’m posting this interview, in fact, in an effort to generate more discourse around the difficult-to-broach topic of rough sex. But agreeing or disagreeing is not my point, here; instead, I merely want to express my pleasure in meeting a person who has the courage to express his unique point of view despite what it might portend for his image.

Within the confines of the porn industry, of course, claiming some form of showboat-misogyny might actually escalate your popularity, not diminish it, but I didn’t get the sense that Brandon was trying to do that. He was venting to me, and if it just so happened to come out bleakly dark, or sickly comic - just like every moment of his Slap Happy collection - well, then that’s just the way the chips fell. Brandon’s unblinking acceptance of his own fucked behavior, which many would leap to condemn as amoral or at least depraved, materializes as a sick yet weirdly honest beacon in a society beset by bullshit and addicted to guile.

The title says it all. Jim ain’t shy.

This interview was taken on a time-out on the set of Jim Powers’ “Tough Love” on August 1st, 2004.

It was a hot afternoon in the North Valley when I talked to these ladies for a very brief spell about being new in the game and their plans for moving forward. Naudia had been around for a very short while, Kristina even less, only about three weeks. They were friendly though not necessarily articulate. However, I always enjoyed speaking with people who were brand, spanking new, simply because they tended to have better things to say about the industry: usually, not only more enthusiastic, but more penetrating. I myself had better and more frequent savvy insights about porn during my first few months in Los Angeles than I did when I had been there for four years as a hack filmmaker. You stay for a while and triple-anals seem banal and you can’t see the forest for the trees and what would be brutal and shocking to a new pair of eyes feels like nothing more than dried horsemeat to your haggard, bitter eyes. What was it that Ashley Blue said? “Porno ages you in dog years.”

Sometimes I think about going back and working for some more on this documentary; and it might well  happen, somewhere down the line. But the venture would only be successful if I went back with new eyes.

Hunter Thompson wrote this letter of warnign to Tom Wolfe when he heard Wolfe was starting a magazine called NEW YORK:

“Your best stuff in Tangerine, etc was all geographically strange. Some punk named Fitzgerald explained it all in terms of “a sense of wonder.” New Yorkers shouldn’t write about New York, like I shouldn’t write about Aspen . . . although I probably will.” (Letter November 28th, 1967).

Just another porno story from Venus, former Penthouse Pet. Here she explains how she got in the business.